Open Source / Open Government

Barack Obama was elected on a platform for change and transparency, prompting some pundits to dub him the first “Open Source President”. But Obama isn’t the only one calling for change and increased transparency in government. Meet the movers and shakers in the transparent government movement and learn how to Open Source government and practically influence local and national government transparency.

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Danese Cooper

PayPal

Danese Cooper has a 25-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. Danese has held many leadership roles within the computer science sector. She has managed teams at Symantec and Apple, served as chief open source evangelist for Sun Microsystems for six years, and served as senior director for open source strategies at Intel for four years. Danese advised the R community on open source policy while at REvolution Computing (now Revolution Analytics) and served as chief technical officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2014, Danese joined PayPal to run OASIS, an office devoted to engineering cultural change through open source, InnerSource, and other key initiatives. Danese continues to run a successful consultancy to companies wishing to pursue open source strategies, which has served the SETI Foundation, Harris Corporation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Numenta among other clients. She is a director on the board of the Drupal Association, a chairperson for the Node.js Foundation board, a board advisor for Mozilla and Ushahidi, and a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Danese was also a board member of the Open Source Initiative for 10 years.

Greg Elin

Sunlight Foundation

Greg Elin created the Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation in 2006 and now serves as the organization’s Chief Data Architect, where he researches and evangelizes new ways to share heterogeneous, incomplete government data. The Sunlight Foundation is a Washington DC-based non-partisan grant making and programming foundation committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency. Greg Elin is also the creator of Fotonotes, an open-source image annotation technology, and has attended Etech for many years and learned a great deal.

Brian Behlendorf

The Hyperledger Project at the Linux Foundation

Brian Behlendorf is Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project at the Linux Foundation. He is also Senior Technology Advisor at Mithril Capital Management in San Francisco. His career has been a mix of technology start-up, public policy, and non-profit tech leadership. Brian serves on the Boards of the Mozilla Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Benetech, three organizations using technology to fight for civil liberties, open technologies, and social impact in the digital domain. Prior to Hyperledger and Mithril, Brian was Chief Technology Officer at the World Economic Forum. He also served for two years at the White House as advisor to the Open Government project within the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and then later as advisor to Health and Human Services on open software approaches to health information sharing. Before that he has founded two tech companies (CollabNet and Organic) and several Open Source software projects (Apache, Subversion, and more).

Silona Bonewald

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Michael Tiemann

Open Source Initiative

Michael Tiemann wrote the GNU C++ compiler (1987), started the world’s first open source copmany (Cygnus Support, 1989), raised the first venture capital for an open source company (1996), joined the OSI Board (2003) and became President of the OSI in 2005.